After years of being mocked by the establishment and the majority of the herd, today millions of "conspiracy theorists" can pat themselves on the back because this Pulitzer's for you. Well, technically it is for the Guardian and WaPo, since these were the media outlets that Edward Snowden picked to release his trove of whistleblowing treasures, which the Pulitzer committee decided were "worthy" of the prize for their "revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security."

And while Edward Snowden did not directly win anything, he did comment from his new residence - where he is not wanted for three felony counts filed by the US Department of "Justice" - a few hundred miles from the unfolding events in the Ukraine, and from the CIA director's secret weekend visit:

“Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognises was work of vital public importance.”

Things got a little more awkward when the media whose sole purpose is to serve the statist masters - and to lie whenever the facade of the status quo is threatened - had to chime in: "It’s clear to me that we are all better off knowing the extent of government surveillance—-even the President has, reluctantly, admitted that,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, told POLITICO. “It’s a prize well-earned, and it seems to me the Pulitzer committee came to the right decision. It’s precisely because a different kind of society—-Putin’s Russia, say—-could never imagine this kind of journalism that we should value and honor it.”

The president may indeed have reluctantly admitted that. Which perhaps explains why his response was to unreluctantly make the NSA even bigger.

As for Mr. Remnick's comment about Putin's Russia, perhaps he should check what country the person who is responsible for today's Pulitzer win is currently living in.

Others dared to suggest that had Obama made a phone call here and there, that the credibility of the Pulitzer prize would have been diminished: "There are times when a nominee is bigger than a prize. This was such a time,” Mitchell Stephens, a Professor of Journalism at New York University’s Carter Institute, said. “The Pulitzer Prizes would have been diminished had they not recognized the Snowden revelations. Fortunately, they did."

Others were outright angry such as republican neocon Peter King who tweeted that "Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace." Luckily nobody cares what King thinks.

Bottom line: as lie after lie falls to the wayside, and as factual evidence disproving what had been decades of engrained, institutionalized fraud is disclosed by disgruntled whistleblowing cogs of a corrupt, bloated government that is is cracking and falling apart under its own unsustainable weight, the winner, as the lies that have kept the broken system together for so long are revealed to all, is the average person. And, of course, all those what were formerly known as "conspiracy theorists" and knew all along just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

"A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism."

-Saul Alynski

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

-George Orwell

The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it's possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic.

Oh, please. Like Putin gives a crap about Snowden, let alone the right of the populace to not be spied on (via an infrastructure which he must envy like crazy). He saw an opportunity to poke the US in the eye and took it.

That's because conspiracy theories are but narratives constructed from random events, baseless assumptions and simple minded biases, fueled by narcissistic self-centered egos reinforced by the certainty of the infallibility of our incomplete and inaccurate personal knowledge. Indeed, they are but basic perceptions which in differing from others, some take extreme exception, generally proving such information largely correct.-in part, Frank Lanza

I was on Reddit today and unfortunately left in disgust as their science AMA on the front page was a psychologist citing papers from our old friend Cass Sunstein, the same fellow who writes a book called "Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas" (i.e. denigrating "conspiracy theories") and then calls on the government to secretly infiltrate anyone that doesn't toe the government line (i.e. commit conspiracy to manipulate discussion.)

Seriously, fuck anyone in government who can't deal with sunshine lighting up the truth and exposing their secrets. There can't be informed consent to govern if there's no valid information to make the decision. They withold information? We withdraw consent!

If Snowden was the genuine article we wouldn't be told what we already knew. We wouldn't be told that the NSA has spied on, for example, Angela Merkel. We'd be told the contents of the intercepts and the assessments thereof and the plans to use them as leverage.

If Snowden was the geniune article we wouldn't be told about the billions of reams of docs in drips and drabs. At this rate we'll all be dead before we get to page 5.

If Snowden and Greenwald (K) were the genuine articles, we might have heard a peep about ISR by now.

Why choose Greenwald? A person whom Snowden had never met. Why choose just one person (two if you include Poitras) as the intermediary and the custodian of those doc? (Snowden claims that he now holds nothing and that Greenwald and Poitras have all of it). Note that both Greenwald and Poitras were recently hired for gazillions of dollars by Pierre Omidyar who now is the de facto owner of those documents. And how much have we heard lately?

Sorry to poke a pin in that bullshit balloon but it all seemed a bit too spoonfed.

So who is Snowden? Jon Rappaport's web site had postulated that Snowden had always been El See Eye Ahh Duh and never left their employment.

En Ess Ahye is more military/MIC while El See Eye Ahh Duh is the elites and their families essentially SS.

We all know that Wa Po is El See Eye Ahh Duh. Ben Bradley dropped the file on Woodward and Bernstein's desk. Why? Supposedly the main reason was the elites who run El See Eye Duh were mad that Nixon was going to doing something with tariffs.

Now who is The Guardian? It was always a left of center Labour Party - trade unionist paper. Doesn't the Red Shield family own it and is it another mouthpiece for Mi6,

Mister, if a slow-motion eagle soaring over a backdrop of a slow-motion flag doesn't move someone to a visceral state of unquestioning, obedient patriotism, then you're going way too easy on them by calling them Merica hating, pinko hippy troop haters.

Anyone that doesn't appreciate the privilege of American Freedom® should be locked up.

Obama hides behind his Nobel Prize to drone children and wedding parties and 16 year old American citizens in Yemen. Besides, he almost started a war with Syria based on lies on sarin. Yet, in a recent poll, he was the most admired in this world next to Bill Gates whose greatest accomplishment has been to betray the trust of billions of his customers to the NSA.

Who says crime does not pay?

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published an article demonstrating that the US government and President Barack Obama knowingly lied when they claimed that the Syrian government had carried out a sarin gas attack on insurgent-held areas last August.

I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died.

The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen.

I visited the site later, once I was able to bear the pain of seeing where he sat in his final moments. Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead.

Thanks for the link, lots of good information in the article. Hersh has testicles the size of church bells, and is one of the last true journalists we have. He is a thorn in the spine of both the GOP and the Dems. His street cred is too high to dismiss him as some lunatic reporter.

Justobserving, Did you see this list. Peace Prize indeed. (said with indignation rolling off every syllable)

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me.

‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

Well I think Putin or more likely the Russian military brass told the US military brass not to do that. The Russia probably said you do not want to see our S300/S400 anti aircraft or Sunburn anti ship missiles. There was no way Russia could or would roll over on Syria.

Yes, that attack would have been devastating with immediate casualties of 5000 to 10,000 and over 100,000 over time would be my guess. Since Putin stopped that war, he has been nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. In any case, here is Seymour Hersh's entire story published in the London Review of Books (circulation 59,265) since no print media in the US would carry that story nor would any major print media in the rest of the Western world - and that's a fact and not conspiracy fiction.

wait a few days, then ask everyone you know who won the Pulitzer. When they say they have no clue, ask them what the update on the rancher story in Nevada is. When they say they have no idea what you are talking about, ask them what the update is on "the pings" coming from nothing, at the bottom of nowhere, is.

And, of course, the odds are next to nil in them knowing about the neo-Nazis who did the coup in Kiev, and that both Obama and Israelis are not only "fine" with it, but fully support and fund it. Well, the Israeli Rabbis support it (the mind reels), and the Americans fund it -- to be technically correct.

...then ask them whether they've heard anything new about Miley's supposed pregnancy, then ask them if they saw the article about how Kate Upton hates her breasts, then ask them if they think Bieber and Gomez make a good couple or if he's just a bad influence who's leading her astray... I don't think you even have to wait a few days.

Most people can't reconcile the myth of the country with the reality of the country. It would be too disturbing for most people. Just how societies are kept organized. Create the right bullshit and people will kill their own kids for the [ king | country | predator bird | immaginary-friend ], just how the brain works.

In 1999 I was tracking people with illegal methods. Didn't even know who or what I was working for; except it be a parent company. Then I asked a question, why were all my bosses retired military communications officers?

Right? You still can't convince some of the true picture though. People struggle with "gov't is good" cognitive dissonance at every turn. Everything that has happened (minus social media) was on display in the movie Enemy of the State.

Well, ZH should definitely get an award on the HFT story (first greenie on ya down below) but thats up to others to do, its a little unseemly to make an award for oneself or to get one for doing absolutely nothing.

Freedom is not dead cougar, not by a long shot. Not as long as you and I are alive.

"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof." - V

I predict that Snowden will be honored greatly -- but only after he is dead.

Even in the Old Testament (for what it's worth), people who spoke the truth and warned of Cause-Effect misdeeds of TPTB, were put to death by TPTB of their day. They were later promoted from Rebel, Trouble-Maker, Traitor, to Hero or Prophet. --> Ergo, "A good prophet is a dead prophet."

Even in modern day USA/USSA, the people who organized and sponsored 11/22/63 in Dallas, had no objections to a bunch of places and things being named after a President they murdered. How ironic history is: The Show Must Go On, it seems.

It would have been insane, and irrational, of the NSA, not to be doing what they were doing, given the technology available to them. The idea they wouldn't be doing it is far more ridiculous - by a considerable margin - than the idea they would be doing it.

It would make no sense whatsoever for it not to be true. The fact it's been confirmed is neither here nor there for me...it's truly mind boggling that people ever thought it wasn't happening.

Edward Snowden, gave up everything for the truth to be known, his sacrifice puts him right up there with some of the greatest human beings on the planet, but it probably wont be acknowledged until after he is dead.

It has been a long road to haul to see the truth so well spoken by so many here. Each and every Soul on board should pat themselves on the back for being here, and being a positive contribution to the whole forum of real truth-seekers.